The Ron DeSantis Guide On How To Quickly Kill Your Political Career

Never has a prospective candidate for president flailed out so quickly and unceremoniously.

Ron DeSantis, the man who was once hailed by some on the right as Trump’s heir apparent, has exited from the 2024 Republican Primaries and endorsed his rival, marking the end of a costly, turbulent campaign that failed to take off with Republican voters.

Despite placing a huge bet on Iowa, the first state in the Republican primaries, where he visited all 99 counties and moved huge numbers of his staff to, the Florida Governor scored 21% of the vote share, a distant second place, only narrowing beating Nikki Haley by 2%, who experienced a late-minute surge.

It is a remarkable turnaround from November 2022, when, fresh off his overwhelming victory over the Democratic centrist Charlie Crist in the Floridian gubernatorial election, DeSantis appeared to be in the best position to dethrone Trump as the Republican Party’s nominee in 2024. Polls conducted in the aftermath of the midterms constantly showed him either neck-in-neck with or surpassing the former president.

DeSantis’ pitch - Trump without all of the baggage - soon fell apart, however, as his campaign veered from one scandal to the next, suffering from mass layoffs and the fallout from producing a social media video that featured a Nazi symbol, the Sonnenrad (or black sun). Constant mockery from Mr. Trump — about everything from Mr. DeSantis’s facial expressions to his choice of footwear — further degraded his image as a confident conservative warrior.

Over the course of the campaign, DeSantis’s national poll numbers roughly halved, plummeting from 20% in May 2023, when he first launched his campaign, to 10% by late December, an indictment of his skills as a candidate and the Republican Party’s infatuation with Trump. While he had started 2023 actually leading Trump in New Hampshire, polls now showed Mr. DeSantis in a distant third place, drawing around 6 percent of the vote.

DeSantis’ strategy of outflanking Trump to the right, like boasting of having passed a 5-week abortion ban in Florida and disseminating theories that Trump was on the payroll of vaccine manufacturers, made him look desperate and stole from him the only convincing argument he had left - his electability. As his right-wing shift alienated the moderates he would have needed to win over in a race against Biden, the GOP base consolidated around Trump, who’s court cases continued to pile up, instigating a rally-around-the-flag effect as Republican voters sided with Trump against the ‘liberal establishment’.

What killed his campaign the most, however, was arguably his personality, or lack thereof. In front of the cameras, DeSantis appeared awkward, frigid, and stilted. Often, his voice would sound nasal and timid, giving the appearance of a man unsure of himself. He also attracted significant mockery, both from the right and left, over his decision to wear high-heeled boots as a way of hiding his short physical height.

Chaos marked the last days of his campaign, just as it had the first, when he kicked off his campaign with a widely mocked and technically marred livestream event on Twitter. Over the weekend, Mr. DeSantis’s schedule was in constant flux, as he flew between New Hampshire and South Carolina with little notice, postponing events and finally canceling his appearances on the Sunday morning political shows.

DeSantis’ departure leaves Nikki Haley, former Governor of South Carolina and Ambassador to the UN, as the only candidate in the race to challenge Trump. The narrowing of the field is something Haley has wanted for a long time as a way to contrast her competent experience with Trump’s erratic and confrontational personality. An upset win in NH may inject a bit of momentum into her stagnant campaign. But with how insommountable Trump’s lead looks to be - with an aggregate of polls putting it around 30%+ - it doesn’t look like it will take that long until Haley also bends the knee and endorses her rival.

For DeSantis, it looks like his political career is over. Since Florida’s state constitution forbades governors from running for a third term, DeSantis’ tenure expires in 2026, leaving him to meander the political wasteland. Any chance he had at succeeding Trump to be the party’s nominee in 2028 seems to have been torpedoed by this disastrous campaign, now that voters have been exposed to how uncharismatic he is.

If it’s any consolation, Ron, you did leave us with some unforgettable memes. ‘Pudding fingers’ will stay with us for eternity.